Circle the Drain
by Rockstar with a Vendetta
Summary: One-Shot. He is not a quick arrow or a gleaming blade: he is only Dom-in-the-middle who doesn't get what he wants.


**This was written for Goldenlake's Military Week!**

**If you don't like slash, I suggest you don't read this.**

**Warning: violence.**

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"They breached the walls! They're coming!"

This was both good news and bad: it was a trap for the Scanrans bandits, as this small but wealthy border town had been evacuated that morning, but battle was never pretty, and these were ex-soldiers they would fight, not malnourished men. Dom tightened his grip on the hilt of his sword and kept his eyes firmly focused on Raoul, waiting for a signal. He felt rather than saw Wolset on his right; the short man was pure energy, all shifts and fidgets. On his left was Lerant, who had forsaken the standard for this fight, and he was Wolset's complete opposite with his stillness and his carefulness. And there was Dom in the middle, always Dom-in-the-middle.

The first of the men rounded the corner of a house furthest down the street, the rest of them at his heels. They had no horses, which the scouts had correctly reported, but they also had good armor, which the scouts had not. Raoul held up a fist, and Dom and the others unsheathed their swords.

Pikes lay at the frontmost men's feet, but they were useless, as the Scanrans were too scattered for a substantial number to be impaled before they realized what was going on. And so, as the enemy began to close the gap of a mere couple yards, Raoul opened his fist, and they charged.

Dom's first opponent was a burly man with the strength of a boulder and the speed of a crippled bear. His choice of weapon was a huge battle-axe that Dom feared would break his sword should they meet. He ducked a powerful swing and hacked into the man's exposed armpit, causing him to drop the axe with a howl of pain. He finished him with a merciful blow to the neck.

He bounded toward another opponent, this one with a sword like his. He spotted Wolset grappling with a man who wielded an axe almost the size of him. Wolset ducked his swing—which would certainly have taken his head clean off—and took that moment to cut into the man's stomach, where his armor was broken. It was not a strong swing, and he would have to do it several more times for the man to fall, but Wolset, small and compact, danced easily out of the bellowing Scanran's reach. Quick, nimble, Wolset-the-arrow.

"Doing all right there, Wolset?" Dom called, parrying the Scanran swordsman's thrust. "Doesn't look like you're measuring up, eh?"

Wolset bared sharp sharp teeth in his direction, transforming his face into something shrewd and ferrety. "Be careful what you say, Masbolle," he shot back, whirling around his opponent in a blur. "At least I measure up where it counts."

Dom sneered, although Wolset couldn't see it. His arm throbbed from a deep gash, courtesy of his inattention, but his opponent paid for it with his life.

A crash of steel right behind him made him pivot sharply, his sword poised for a parry. Instead, he had to dodge a dead Scanran who practically fell on him, bleeding profusely from a wound to the heart. Lerant stood in his place, with his sword dripping red almost to the hilt and a vicious grin on his face.

"Fancy meeting you here," he drawled, easily dispatching another man. "You're rather unobservant, you know that?"

Dom bit back a retort. His heart was hammering from this near miss; he would have lost his life that moment had Lerant not had his back. But, of course, that was Lerant: all sharp edges, with a frightening bravery that Dom had never known before.

He engaged another man, noticing that the enemy's numbers were dwindling. Wolset was also battling another man, further away than before. Everyone in the Own knew that while his stature hindered him taking down as many men as the rest of them, he was rarely injured, and never beaten. He was once compared to Alexander of Tirragen, who was known as the greatest swordsman of his time after the Lioness.

Lerant stepped beside him with an opponent of his own, his body a whirl of delicate footwork and clever strokes. He was always underestimated, which was a dangerous thing to do to a son of a disgraced and traitorous house. Like a dog that had been beaten one time too many, would he ever turn on those few who were kind to him, like biting the hand that fed him? The thought instantly made Dom feel guilty—this was his _friend_, after all, and he had just saved his life.

"As repayment for graciously saving you," Lerant said between panting breaths, "I expect you to be my slave for, say, a month."

"Your slave?" Dom snorted. He blocked a blow. "What would you expect me to do?"

"Why, anything I asked, of course," the other man replied archly.

His grin was innocently playful, never meaning what he said, never meaning anything, but Dom had a sudden image of Lerant's bare body, lean and sun-browned and twisting beneath his hands. He imagined how the hard planes of his back would feel, the taste of his cruel mouth against his own, fingers tangled in his hair—

Pain exploded in his thigh and Dom howled, doubling over to clutch it. Blood seeped through his hands and stained his trousers dark crimson. Again his inattention would cost him, but this time he wasn't going to have the strength to block the oncoming blow—his opponent had slashed deep into muscle and maybe an artery, from the amount of blood, and his leg was already giving way beneath his weight. _Damn it,_ he thought dully, _I'm going to die._

And then a battle-cry sounded behind him, rising in crescendo to an ear-splitting shriek, and Lerant was suddenly standing over him, bring his sword around to defend Dom from the Scanran menace. No inattention there; no foolish and baseless daydreams to distract this man. Lerant was all righteous fury and flashing eyes, graceful in battle as so few were. If Wolset was the arrow, then Lerant was the bow that strung him, the blade that accompanied him.

"Get up," Lerant was hissing in his ear, pulling his arm demandingly. "Get up, you idiot. Unless you want to bleed out here?"

_I should_, Dom wanted to say. _I'm an idiot, and I'll never be as good as you or Wolset or anyone, so why should I bother? _But Lerant was already heaving him up with an arm around his waist, letting him sag against him.

Dom began, "My leg—"

"Work through it," Lerant said brutally.

Every step was agony, but Dom forced himself forward if only because his companion didn't seem inclined to stop and let him lie down. The bandits were retreating—or what was left of them, anyway—and Raoul sent half the company to chase them down and make sure they left the area for good. Emmet knelt beside Dom, hands covering the wound and burning it with his healer's magic. He wanted to cry out, but Raoul was looking over at him with concern, and Lerant was staring down at him with a scowl and an ironic mouth, so he kept his pain only to low hisses.

Through the fog in his mind, he heard Raoul say, "Is he going to be all right? That wound is deep, Emmet."

"I'll be fine, milord," Dom said gamely, trying and failing to smile up at him. "Just a scratch, is all."

"You must not be dying if you can joke about it." Raoul's voice was dry, but his eyes were kind. "Heal that leg well, Emmet. Who's going to follow a crippled sergeant?"

"I will!" Wolset chimed in, ever loyal. He leaned on his sword, splattered in blood that wasn't his own. "If Lerant would've stopped babbling at him, he wouldn't have been distracted."

Lerant sniffed. "You're just jealous I can multitask," he said loftily. "Besides, I saved Dom's life twice in one hour. I think I deserve a little praise."

Wolset clucked and patted his shoulder, and Lerant irritably shrugged him off. He pulled out a linen from his shirt, but didn't wipe the blood and sweat from his face; he merely clutched it absentmindedly like an anchor. There was a small crest stitched in the corner, and Dom squinted at it, trying to make it out. It looked like an owl, against a blue-gray and cream shield. It pricked something in his mind, and he suddenly thought, _Kel_.

Kel and _Lerant_?

It was absolutely absurd but there was no other reason for Lerant to have Kel's linen. And there was no reason for Dom to feel betrayed by both of them, or jealous, or irrationally angry. But he was. He had nearly gotten himself killed just by imagining doing—things—with Lerant, only to be saved by the very thing that damn near got him killed. He appreciated irony, but not when he was in the middle of it; he hated being Dom-in-the-middle. He was never Wolset-the-arrow, never Lerant-the-blade.

Just before Dom lost consciousness, he thought, _Gods, I really am an idiot._

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_**Please review!**


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